Escaped Thoughts

Not Zen

 

rice and tea for lunch

Buddha on the windowsill

I feel so not Zen

Lost

Not all those who wander are lost.

 

 

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

   —  J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

A Good Investment

Grace Groner's parents passed away when she was 12 years old, leaving her to live with a family friend, George Anderson.  Anderson paid for Groner's college education.  When she graduated in 1931 she took a secretarial job at Abbott Laboratories where she stayed for 43 years.

She bought 3 shares of Abbott for $180 in 1935. She lived to be 100 years old and bequeathed the shares to her alma mater (Lake Forest College).  Current value: $7 million.

Love and Chocolates

"All you need is love.

But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt."

— Charles M. Schulz

Elizabeth Bishop at 100

The poet Elizabeth Bishop was born 100 years ago on Feb. 8. Her father died months later, and her mother was institutionalized early in her childhood, so she was raised by relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

She became one of the most beloved and important American poets of the 20th century, although her greatest fame came after her death in 1979.

To celebrate her centennial, Farrar Straus & Giroux, her publisher for most of her career, is bringing out three new editions of her writing :

• Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence - her letters to and from The New Yorker
• and a pair of companion volumes called simply Poems and
• Prose

These books make clear that Bishop was as much a prose writer as she was a poet.  Prose is in fact considerably fatter than Poems, which contains all of the The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 plus a selection from the posthumous collections of drafts and fragments.

Infinite Turtles

sand toys

sand toys, originally uploaded by ronk53.

or snow toys, I suppose